Tag Archives: business plan

Obtaining funds to start a new business or to expand an existing one can be a challenging and exciting experience. Before lenders and investors can commit to funding, they will want to know there is a high chance that your business will be successful.

Certain areas need to be addressed and prepared such as a coherent and comprehensive business plan that includes marketing strategies, financials, product or service offerings, competitor analysis, and short- and long-term growth strategies.

Most aspiring entrepreneurs understand that you can’t build a business if you won’t commit to delivering a product or service, but many are hesitant or refuse to commit to any financial forecasts. Yet every business requires revenue and volumes, as certainly as it requires a product to sell. Thus, financial projections for up to five years are a necessary element in every business plan.

External investors will demand a financial forecast, but it’s equally valuable to you, even if bootstrapping. How else will you be able to convince yourself and your team that your business is viable? You need these projections to set internal goals and milestones, and to measure your progress toward reasonable success objectives.

Other deal trends continued to point to investor caution and negotiating leverage. The percentage of deals with participating preferred provisions increased from the prior quarter across all deal stages. The data also saw an increase in the utilization of pay-to-play provisions in Q3. In another signal of investor caution, we witnessed the percentage of tranched transactions reaching 20.5% of deals in the quarter, a marked increase from the prior quarter.

Pitching to investors is a crucial moment in your company’s life. It’s easy to get so caught up talking about all the big-picture awesomeness of your product that you forget to go into the specifics of your business plan. But investors expect your to address both the business and product sides of your endeavour. If you spend to much time explaining one side or the other, it might leave investors unsatisfied or confused about your company. So, in order to help you better understand what specifically investors are looking for in a presentation, we at YetiZen have decided to describe some of the most common mistakes in investor pitches and how to avoid them.

Proverbs 29:18 says, ‘Where there is no vision, the people perish’. President George H.W. Bush famously said, ‘I don’t do the ‘vision thing’’. And your mom said, ‘Eat your carrots, it will improve your vision’. Somewhere in those three different perspectives, you can see how people look at the idea of vision. Some see it as corporate boilerplate, some don’t get it and some think it’s a matter of survival. I tend to fall in with the latter camp.

Vision is imagining a future state you want to achieve. It’s where you want to be at some date certain. Some people visualize a nice house and car and comfortable life but little beyond that. Even though they may not know it, they choose the schooling, jobs and investments they need to achieve that vision. Their unconscious mind keeps working toward the vision they have set.

People who don’t visualize where they want to be in the future end up wherever the tides of chance carry them. They may be lucky and end up in a good situation, but more often than not, if they are living in the moment all the time, and the outcomes are not usually satisfactory.

Like Teach For America, VFA will bring promising college graduates to work in underserved communities for at least two years. Startups that focus on up-and-coming industries (i.e. education innovation, energy, biotechnology) will be offered a VFA fellow for a salary of $32,000 to $38,000 annually. At the end of the two years, the companies can opt to hire fellows under new terms.